


Cursed Woman, Cursed Land, Cursed Time

by Livia_LeRynn



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Blindness, Everything Hurts, F/M, Forehead Touching, Hugs, Max Comes Back, Pining, Post-Canon, Sad, Ten Years Later, brief mention of masturbation, canon typical illness, canon typical injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-23 20:04:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20345938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livia_LeRynn/pseuds/Livia_LeRynn
Summary: When he disappeared into the crowd, Furiosa didn’t have the energy to do anything other than recognize that this was the last time she would ever see him.  This was the way of her cursed life in this cursed land and cursed time.  He had the gall to tell her of all people that hope was a mistake, as if she didn’t already know.  It was just the way of the road to take a person apart one piece at a time.





	Cursed Woman, Cursed Land, Cursed Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Owlship](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/gifts).

> Owlship asked for a Max Comes Back story for FTH. I’ve written a number of reunions for them that occur shortly post canon. This time I decided to make them wait a little longer.

There once was a wordburger that went something like, “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” Furiosa, however, never had this problem. 

It all started when she was very young. She asked her father to bring her a penguin from his trading migrations after she heard about them in a story. Furiosa would day dream of that silly bird, how she would make it her pet and let it dance with for her. Of course her father never found one. He managed to find a toy penguin, but even that he lost to raiders.

When her mother lay wounded in the slaver’s tent, Furiosa prayed to every goddess she knew and all those she didn’t that her mother would live; Mary Jabassa died anyway. A great many days later, Furiosa dreamed she held the greatest power between her two hands, but then she woke up with only one. 

From then on, Furiosa knew she was cursed: everything she wanted would never come, and nothing she dreamed would ever be... unless the fates found someway to make it wrong and twisted. The fates were cruel like that. Every time Furiosa tried to run home, something brought her back. When she finally made it back to the Green Place, it wasn’t green any longer. When she wanted to kill the Immortan, she did it, but her memory of her triumph died with her. When she wanted someone to live, they died. When she wanted to die, she lived.

As far as curses go, it was far from the worst. Furiosa even found ways to manage it. She guarded her desires carefully and always kept her hopes vague. If she never really gave voice to the things she wanted, not even in the confines of her own head, she might get to have them for a sliver of time. Every little bit mattered. 

When the Fool refused to ride to the ends of the earth with her, he called her back instead. He had the gall to tell her of all people that hope was a mistake, as if she didn’t already know. Then when she wanted him to stay, and he was the one to go. She was out of her mind to even think such a thing, delirious from dehydration and blood loss. When he disappeared into the crowd, Furiosa didn’t have the energy to do anything other than recognize that this was the last time she would ever see him. This was the way of her cursed life in this cursed land and cursed time.

However, she never stopped wanting him to stay, and when the wanting took on a more sensual shape she let it. Max was gone for good, so what difference would it make if she pretended he wasn’t? She could picture the shapes of his hands, his mouth, his shoulders, his bum as her fingers moved over her own body’s secret places. When her heart settled and her chills calmed he would be just as gone as ever. In this way at least she was contented. 

Furiosa still wanted to leave the Citadel, but every time she did, something brought her back. She kept saying that she just needed to train the girls to lead, and that once they grew their own calluses and lost their softness, the Citadel would be theirs. But delegating tasks and sitting back calmly while they were done were very different matters. Furiosa kept running herself in circles because she didn’t know how to be still and had no one to teach her. Every circle led her back to the Citadel, and in the dark calm of her room, she would find Max. 

Her few chrome hairs became many. Her black paint settled into the lines on her face. The girls never really lost their softness, and that was fine; at least they were still alive. Furiosa had spent enough time wiring together a life from bits of scrap metal to know that what worked just fine was not to be fixed and that anything keeping a person alive worked just fine. Things could always be better, but they could always be worse as well 

That perspective would come to taunt her when the road took her eyes. Maybe it was the Bullet Farmer’s ghost one back for revenge. Maybe it was just luck. Either way, it was just the way of the road to take a person apart one piece at a time. Given enough days, it would do the same to the girls; to Max it probably already had. Furiosa was grateful that she would never need to see its destruction. 

The girls who were hardly girls anymore wept for her. They tried to hide behind hopeful words as they turned the pages of the crumbling books in frantic search for a treatment, but their sniffles were too loud to miss. The books said many things, and maybe even some of them helped, but the darkness never left Furiosa’s eyes.

Furiosa, however, was nothing if not adaptive. She had been adapting her entire life: first to the Vault, then to the wastes, then to the barracks, and then to the top of the Citadel. So she learned to shoot by sound, never quite as sharply as she did before, but far better than anyone could reasonably expect. She even still drove because by now everyone who was anyone in the wastes knew to get out of her way. 

She still even thought of leaving, but every time she returned, not because she needed to but because she wanted to. This became her rhythm, wanting to be gone when she was there and there when she was gone. Even if the Citadel wasn’t quite her _home_, it was still her place. She knew it’s every hallway, the curves of its walls, the slopes of its floor, and which places smelled the most green. She knew she was lucky to have it. Outside on her own she wouldn’t last long, but living here she could outlast everyone who ever wanted her head on a spike. So far it had been working out. "Living well is the best revenge," Miss Giddy used to say.

Furiosa was in her room, working at her table and enjoying the sun on her skin while she cleaned her rifle when she heard a car approaching the lift. It had a rich sound, deep, well-cared for like few engines outside War Boy care. She smiled at the hum as she ran a soft cloth over her weapon’s barrel and paid more attention to the scents of grease and gun powder than to the goings on outside. It was just another vagrant, maybe here to trade. The girls who were always be her girls would take care of things.

Or so she thought. It was not ten minutes before Cheedo came barreling down the hallway, her boots pounding the stone as if she had only a thousand days to her name instead of ten thousand. “Furiosa, you’re never going to guess…”

She didn’t need to guess. His foot fall was the same as ever, heavier, slower, but still very much the same. 

Furiosa's heart seemed to have slipped outside her skin and exposed itself to the morning chill. Her skin prickled in a single wave. She waited there on that crest for a drop that had been coming for the past thirty-five hundred days. 

The Fool approached her slowly, his softened leather shifting as her nose filled with musk and sand and grease and beneath them, a gentle familiarity. His hand slipped around the base of her skull, and then as he pulled her closer until their skins touched, her heart, her belly, everything dropped at once. 

“Hey,” Furiosa whispered as if no time had passed at all. 

Max said nothing about her eyes, and she loved him for it. She said nothing about the quiver in his fingers either, or the way he seemed to sigh into her like she were a waiting bed after a long, hard day. 

It was nothing like she had imagined in all those dark hours she had stolen for herself. She had imagined his touch to be sure and steady. She had imagined his breathing to be smooth. All these reasons were how she knew this moment was real.

“Nice to see you again, Max,” Cheedo chirped as she slipped out of the room, “so much to do…”

Furiosa waited until she heard the door latch to ask, “How did you know I was still alive?” 

He just shrugged beneath his jacket. Would he still have come if she weren’t? She didn’t want to know. Why did he chose now to come back after all this time?

She turned the mended edge of his collar between her fingers until the brushing of the underside of her wrist against a bundle of tubing made her chest ache with hollowness. It probably wasn’t the same tubing, which meant he found more. How many other veins had he slipped himself inside without asking anything in return? 

His chest caved beneath her touch, and his breath caught in his throat. She touched her short arm to his scarred and damp cheek. She could only guess at the thousands of thoughts that could be moving through his mind. Her only clues were the way his fingers tightened on her scalp, sending shivers down her spine, and the way he sniffed and softly panted. She could almost hear his breath change as his mouth stretched into an almost smile.

His other hand found her rib cage, and it hovered there with only the slightest touch as she expanded and contracted. His touch was light, not so much with care as with disbelief, or maybe caution, as if she were a weapon with a hair trigger. Maybe that’s why the old fire in her chest was stirring.

When she found the lumps on his neck, she understood. She had a thousand questions buzzing in her mind, but as she drew a breath in and out, she sent them away. She was old, not really old but old for her times, and more importantly she was tired, tired of wishing and wanting things that were gone and things that would never be. As a cursed woman in a cursed land and a cursed time, everything was too much to ask. It was just the way of the road to take a person apart one piece at a time.

So she pulled Max tightly to her and held him as safe as she could while she said, “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for coming home.”


End file.
